Does anyone else think that the website in question got a huge surge of page hits (and therefore advertising revenue) from a Fark link, and so proceeded to write another article deriding Fark and Farkers, thereby ensuring additional page hits and advertising revenue?

Interesting word, isn't it: "glamorize." This is usually a word used by people who see something in a movie that they don't like that reflects society or the wants of the filmgoing public, with the unspoken implication that the thing on screen is in part responsible for the tragedies of real life.

It's weird how so many people think that ANYTHING on a movie screen is glamorous, as if we're still in the glittering days of the studio system with its sparkling stars and spotlight performances. I went to see Les Miserables last week - there was NOTHING glamorous about its portrayal of what passed for the early 19th century justice system. Seeing Anne Hathaway as a shorn, toothless hooker dying of tuberculosis in a hospital bed, never to see her daughter again, did nothing whatsoever to fill me with desire to emulate her position. Yet there's this idea that simply rendering it onto a movie screen is "glamorizing" it.

This was the tack Dan Quayle took when he accused Murphy Brown of "glamorizing" single motherhood - "it's on a screen, so therefore, ergo, they must be making it look appealing." I'm a little surprised that people are still trying to use it, but at least it's a flag. When someone uses the word "glamorizing," you pretty much know the rest of the article is that chess kid screaming "Stop liking what I don't like!"

Don't believe me, ask this guy how guns can protect people from home invasions and other crimes.

An Atlanta mom took matters into her own hands on Friday when confronting an intruder. The unidentified woman hid with her 9-year-old twins in a crawlspace as a man broke into her house and began rummaging through it. The alleged burglar, Paul Ali Slater, eventually found the family's hiding space, but not before finding himself staring down the barrel of a .38 revolver. The woman fired six shots, five of which hit Slater in the face and neck, but he managed to flee after the family ran to a neighbor's house.

Re: "There simply is no evidence to support the notion that violent movies lead to violent behavior."

Yeah, tell that to those who've lost family members to disturbed people either imitating, or trying to impress or address perceived slights of fictional movie characters, including the latest in a long series -- the Joker of Aurora.

While those in the soft sciences may have yet to prove the hypothesis, it's pretty clear to real people that there's a causal link.

This from the comments is classic DERP: "Real people" just know THE TRUTH in their gut that science has failed to show!

c'mon...our fark GOP shills troll better than this crap. at least blame video games or something. don't just scream 'I WON SO THERE" and run away into the night. that's just plain stupid.

They did(well, movies in general) in a pseudo-scientific way.

But they are the first to protest that their cinematic glamorization of violence means absolutely nothing and doesn't influence behavior in the slightest. That's ridiculous. Sponsors pay billions of dollars each year in the hopes that their short messages interspersed with televised entertainment will change the behavior of potential shoppers. If what we watch doesn't have any impact on what we do, then every advertiser in the world is wasting money.

The failure in perception there is that modern ads are not to get you to eat bad, it's to see their brand of bad and choose it over another. It's no longer notification to the public that they exist, but that they're the right choice of the alternatives.

It's a result of the Escalation principle, similar to the arms race. IF they don't advertise, and others do, they will lose business. It's a maintenance issue, not a new customer issue.

As for TV/movies teaching violence, it's apples and oranges to how people are influenced. Millions of people see violence, very few do violence. You take a violent person, they're going to be violent no matter what they're exposed to on TV, no amount of LifetimeTM movies are going to change them. You take a non-violent person, and they're going to continue to not kill people, no matter how many gore fests they watch on TV.

As far as rational adults go. You expose babies to such things on a grand scale, and it may warp their views somewhat, but that's not the claim. The claim is that TV made me do it, and it's patently false.

You take a person who never eats fast food, no amount of commercials are going to make them eat fast food.

You take people that eat lots of fast food, that little reminder, "hey, we exist and we taste good" may influence a decision.

You take a violent person and show them a violent movie, they may be motivated to try a different technique.

But in all, the outcome has already been determined, whether it's "be violent" or "eat fast food". The only question is a matter specifically, of how that manifests.

Similarly, as to the author(s) of the article, you show an idiot a rational discussion, and odds are he'll just continue being an idiot. That has already been determined.

Their failure, at base, is in the assumption that all people are equal templates to be imprinted upon by the media which they consume.

In the face of a lifetime of influences, to include genetics, what is seen on TV will only have a minor effect on people and will not change them drastically.

Normal people will not be turned into axe murders. Idiot's will not be made to be intelligent. And those dregs of society that are murderers and rapists will not be reformed by watching Dora the Explorer.

They're living some innane daydream of utopia where there is an easy fix.

"Our editorial, then, was not a call for the repeal or even the modification of the First Amendment. And it was most certainly not a claim that if the Quentin Tarantinos of the world were silenced, then violence would go away. Instead, it was an attempt to spur a discussion on one component of a complex problem without a simple remedy."

Fark.com, a humor-themed news aggregator website, labeled the piece "stupid" and derisively claimed that the Deseret News had taken the position that "we all know that if we stopped killing each other in movies, then death would just take a holiday."

You know, the extent of editorializing by actual paid employees of Fark is the choice of which headline to green. I'm not thinking they had a lot to choose from when it comes to an article from a Mormon website.

I don't think it's okay to classify headlines published here as being the opinion of the site any more than it is okay to classify a published "letter to the editor" as the opinion of a newspaper. Just because Fark chose to publish a 250-character limit description of the article doesn't mean they agree with the description, just that it would engender discussion, which is exactly what the linked article wanted to happen in the first place.

The Larch:thomps: i feel like we're right on the verge of solving this gun violence problem, we probably only need four or five more fark threads discussing it.

Is there some way to tie guns and Benghazi together into one uber-sized fark thread? Maybe we could say that Ambassador Stevens was killed because he was going to tell the press about Obama's secret CIA training program for mass-shooting wack jobs?

Because I think that would be a fark thread better than a swimming pool full of maggots eating rotten meat.

Fark megathread checklist

-Benghazi-Pro-gun/anti-gun-Fast and Furious-PONIES!-Reality shows-Obama(birth certificate)-CIA program for mass shootings-Special guest appearance by Alex Jones with support from Ric Romero